Travelling with James Mattis, Donald Trump’s Pick for Secretary of Defense

Could James Mattis, the former head of Central Command, have a moderating influence on the Trump Administration and its foreign policy?

Photograph by Alex Brandon / AP

In September, 2011, I met General James Mattis, then in charge of U.S. Central Command, at its headquarters, in Tampa, Florida. Central Command directs American military forces in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The General’s staff had agreed to allow me to travel with him on an extensive tour of “the sandbox,” as American military officers sometimes call the region.

The itinerary was the sort that a travel agent on hallucinogens might propose: Tampa-Amman-Cairo-Doha-Abu Dhabi-Islamabad-Kabul, plus a final stopover in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. I would be the only reporter on his plane for eight days or so. The main ground rules were “deep background,” meaning I could use in my reporting what I learned from talking to Mattis and his staff but should not attribute that information to them. And I was free to interview others I encountered along the way, under whatever ground rules I could negotiate.

During our trip, I interviewed the General three times and chatted with him informally on many other occasions. I kept a detailed diary of all the discussions I had on the road. This week, after President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Mattis as his Secretary of Defense, I reread the diary. Now that Mattis might stand between Trump and, say, an order to launch a war or to ready nuclear weapons for use, I thought I should reread the files for insight into his thinking and character.

Mattis is a lean man of medium height. He is open, direct, and humorous. He can occasionally say startling things: “It’s fun to shoot some people,” he told an audience in 2005, referring to enemy guerrillas. In battle, Mattis’s boldness had earned him the nickname “Mad Dog,” and when he commanded the Marines’ 1st Division during the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, his radio call sign was “Chaos.” In 2011, the General was sixty-one years old. Now a four-star general, he was well along in a professional transition from battlefield commander to quasi-diplomat. When I hung out with him, his job consisted largely of reading briefing books and memorizing talking points for meetings with Middle Eastern generals and heads of state.

As a participant in President Obama’s national-security cabinet, during discussions on secure video or in the Situation Room, the main questions facing Mattis that September concerned the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fallout from the Arab Spring, which had erupted in Tunisia, in February, and then spread across the Sunni Arab world. He was also involved in discussions about Iran’s nuclear program, the Tehran regime’s regional ambitions, and how to manage the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Mattis does not present himself as an intellectual, but he reads a great deal, especially military history and political analysis. During our trip, he was carrying around a bundle of British diplomatic cables, shared by the British government and written by Simon Gass, who served as London’s Ambassador to Iran between 2009 and 2011. (He did not share the cables with me.) Even though the cables were a little dated, composed before the Arab Spring, Mattis mentioned that they were the best material on Iran he had encountered, and that he liked sometimes to reread them before entering into cabinet discussions or meetings with foreign leaders.

It is common to observe, based on congressional testimony and other public comments he has made, that Mattis has taken a hard line toward Iran, particularly the activities of the Revolutionary Guards and other allied or expeditionary Iranian militant units in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. During our discussions, Mattis made a few comments along those lines. But mainly he seemed focussed on deepening America’s long-standing military and political alliances with Sunni Arab states—Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. During his time at Central Command, he spent many hours talking to counterparts in those countries, which tend to view Shia revolutionary Iran as a serious threat. The smaller, militarily weaker Sunni states closest to Iran—such as the U.A.E.—were and remain acutely anxious that the United States might sell out their security in some Nixon-to-China grand bargain with Tehran.

I had the sense that, in Obama’s cabinet, Mattis channelled those Sunni Arab anxieties forcefully, but I never heard him itching for another Middle Eastern war or talking up the benefits of bombing Iran preëmptively. Over all, the Mattis in my notes seemed intently focussed on stability, wary of warfare that sought to promote democracy or idealism, sentimental about the independence of the Baltic states, firmly committed to NATO, and unsentimental about Russia. During our stay in Estonia, he spoke publicly at a think-tank conference and made plain his commitment to the Baltic states’ membership in NATO and the obligation to defend them from Russian aggression. He was particularly emotional about the role Estonian soldiers had played as NATO members in Afghanistan and the sacrifices in lives they had made there.

Mattis made a few remarks about the Pentagon and its role in American foreign policy that it seems fair to quote five years later, given the stakes associated with his nomination by Trump. During our travels, the Arab Spring was already turning toward civil unrest or outright war in Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen. Mattis was clearly inclined to reinforce some of the incumbent regimes, for the sake of regional stability.

“It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day,” he told me, referring to the condolence letters he sent to the families of American soldiers then dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t think the U.S. military is conservative. It’s pragmatic.” At the same time, he said that he had “no problem” telling authoritarian leaders to allow domestic political protest to evolve peacefully. He recalled that he had advised an Egyptian counterpart about the unrest in Cairo, “At Kent State, we shot our own people, and it didn’t work out very well.”

While we were in Cairo, the General’s plane broke down. We ended up stuck on a hot runway for about twelve hours. The Air Force’s effort to fix the plane or find a replacement went poorly. Mattis handled the inconvenience without ever raising his voice or displaying any sense of entitlement. Maybe he blows up at people or barks for air-conditioning when reporters aren’t around, but my take was that combat had left him with an unusually calm, centered temperament. It would be helpful if he could impress that steadiness onto the President-elect.

In my notes of interviews with Mattis and his staff, I found none of the invective about individuals, partisan commentary, or loose talk about American civilian leaders that have characterized Trumpland. I was curious about how Obama’s national-security cabinet functioned, so I asked a lot of questions about how things went down in the Situation Room. One officer on the trip described Hillary Clinton, then the Secretary of State, as the most strategic thinker, “by a factor of ten,” on Obama’s Principals Committee, the main cabinet-level body that deliberated on foreign policy.

The confirmation of Mattis, who retired from the military only three years ago, would present a worrisome departure from civilian control over the Pentagon. Congress would have to issue a special waiver. In a normal Republican Presidency, such an exception and the precedent it would set would be deeply worrying. But there is, of course, very little that is normal about the President-elect or the appointments he has made. If Mattis is confirmed, there is at least the possibility that the General will move the Trump Administration toward reinforcing peaceful alliances and international stability, and will refuse to allow the Administration’s extremism to influence him.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad. He is the author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.”